Many niches have periodic events such as holidays, quarterly reports, retrospectives, best-of lists, etc… where each period begins/ends with some similar, but updated content.
For instance if you run a dating advice site, you might run a contest every year for free valentines day gifts to give to your significant other.
What I see a lot of websites do is either create a new page on there site/blog, mixed in with the rest of the content, or they will do something like http://site.faux/contests/valentines-contest-2009.php.
Neither of these are great ideas. You should be “reusing” those old urls, with all their old links and authority. Each “round” of new content will breed a collection of new links while the old links still continue to pass juice.
Remember! The on-page content has to be similar, so if one contest is a for a beer pong set and another is a free oil change, you would be diluting anchor text relevancy, which is bad.
What you should do is, not prominently link to the periodic content (http://site.faux/valentinest-contest) when it is outdated, and then re-link prominently to the periodic content when it comes into vogue.
You then use footers/sidebars to link to the last periods’ content from the page that now has the updated content, i.e. from http://site.faux/valentines-contest to http://site.faux/archives/valenties-contest-2009.php.
You can and should update the title/meta/etc. “Valentines Contest – Win a Gift Certificate for Best Gift Ideas (2010).”
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
Loading ...
3 Comments
I just finished reading through all of the old posts on your site and then this one popped up. I can’t really say another than letting you know that I think you’re brilliant. This site is just full of fantastic ideas. I’ll definitely be putting some to work.
Oh, and I hope more people don’t find out about this site. I like having a competitive advantage.
define prominently? pls.
In the context: “What you should do is, not prominently link to the periodic content,” I think he means that you should do occasional linking to keep the page fresh, but don’t constantly link and make it obvious that you’re linking – if you link a lot and people start finding new links to a Valentine’s Day page in the middle of August, they’ll be a little confused.